Asia & Middle East Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)

On November 11, 1938, Pearl Buck awoke to learn that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Her first reaction—in Chinese—was “Wo bu xiangxin (我不相信)” or “I don’t believe it.” She added in English: “That’s ridiculous. It should have gone to [Theodore] Dreiser.” Despite tremendous popular support, the literary establishment shared Buck’s disbelief. Critic Norman Holmes Pearson labeled the choice “hammish,” while William Faulkner derided Pearl as “Mrs. Chinahand Buck.” To this day, scholars often dismiss Buck’s writings as didactic or trite.

Pearl Buck was the first American woman—and only the third American after Sinclair Lewis (1930) and Eugene O’Neill (1936)—to win the Nobel Prize. Many of her contemporary critics burned with obvious misogyny, a racist disinterest in her Chinese subjects, and just plain jealousy at her titanic commercial success. Indeed, although writers win the Nobel for their body of work, it was Buck’s smash-hit novel The Good Earth (1931) that had most seized the world’s attention.

Despite scholarly reserve, The Good Earth is a remarkable novel. Many critics have chosen to see simplistic melodrama and even offensive stereotypes in its pages; however, for millions more worldwide readers, the novel is distinguished by its deeply moving sincerity. Set in the grinding poverty of rural Anhui, the novel opens as the humble farmer Wang Lung wakes on his wedding day. Rejoicing, he boils water for his ailing father and sprinkles in a few tealeaves, a luxury his father complains is “like eating silver.” But Wang Lung is too excited to care and even wastes precious water on washing himself for the first time in months. He hurries to the great House of Hwang, where his intended bride O-lan is a slave. Decadent opium addicts, the powerful Hwang family often sells off minor slaves as wives for poor men. Plain but loyal and uncomplaining, O-lan becomes Wang Lung’s companion, the mother of his much-desired sons, and at several crucial junctures, his salvation.

We follow the ambitious Wang Lung and dutiful O-lan from their wedding day through to their deathbeds. Although beautifully written, their journey is rarely pretty. The young couple is hardworking and scrimps and saves to buy small tracts of land from the debauched House of Hwang. Buck’s descriptions of O-lan’s pregnancies and deliveries are stark and painful even now. In a devastating famine, Wang Lung’s pernicious aunt and uncle commit cannibalism, while O-lan must secretly kill her hungry newborn girl. They abandon their home, beg by the roadside, and only a windfall saves their lives. But as Wang Lung regains his fortune, he also accretes a hubris and dissipation that once consumed the House of Hwang. Throughout the novel, Buck’s genuine investment in the emotional lives of her characters shines through against even the most determined critiques.

The Good Earth holds a special appeal for students of history. It was the best-selling American novel of 1931 and 1932, the darkest days of the Great Depression. Its sequel novel Sons (1932) and silver screen adaptation (1937) were also runaway successes. Moreover, the novel is a testament to the American expatriate world that thrived in prewar China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Pearl Buck (née Sydenstricker) grew up in China, spoke Chinese as her first language, and only at the age of forty-two came to live permanently in the United States. As her biographer Peter Conn emphasizes, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Buck exerted “more influence over Western opinions about Asia than any other American”—with the possible exception of another American expatriate born in China, Time founder Henry Luce.

Finally, The Good Earth calls us to revisit a great American writer who fought for her beliefs in the face of dark international horizons and withering criticism—in both China and America. Indeed, most contemporary Chinese critics were privileged elites who found it offensive that international readers might define China by its unsophisticated farmers rather than the refined arts and literati culture of imperial China. A woman in a man’s profession, Buck boldly wrote from the viewpoint of Chinese peasants and underscored their resolution and dignity. True to this novel’s title, her work also champions respect for nature and its finite resources. She condemned Japanese imperialism and evangelical Christianity alike. In 1938, she urged the U.S. government to open immigration to European Jews and personally sponsored as many as the law permitted. Her critiques of Chiang Kai-shek and acknowledgement of Chinese Communist accomplishments drew a firestorm from hysterical Cold Warriors. She was an outspoken advocate for birth control, international adoption, and the rights of children with special needs (her daughter Carol suffered from Phenylketonuria, or PKU). And while The Good Earth racked up enormous sales, a Pulitzer Prize, and even eventually Buck’s Nobel, this engrossing novel is most profoundly a testament to the worth of underestimated human beings, whatever their creed, color, shape or size.

Photo Credits:

Between the Covers, Rare Book Inc., First Edition Cover of “The Good Earth,” released in 1938

www.betweenthecovers.org via Wikipedia

Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession by Haggai Ram (2009)

by Lior Sternfeld

Two weeks ago the British Guardian revealed that the Israeli Air-Force has been conducting secret training exercises in preparation for an imminent attack on Iran. As the war drums beats get stronger, one should ask why Iran preoccupies such a large part of Israel’s inner discourse? If Iran imposes such an existential threat to Israel, why do threats sound louder coming from Jerusalem? I am no expert on nuclear issues, therefore the goal of this essay is not to assess the level of threat Iran poses to Israel, but rather to question the pathology of the Israeli obsession with an Iranian threat.

There could be no better time to read Haggai Ram’s Iranophobia: the Logic of an Israeli Obsession (full disclosure: Haggai Ram was my MA Thesis advisor and is a friend). Haggai Ram, a prominent Israeli scholar, offers a new reading of the long history of the relationship between Israel and Iran, and persuasively analyzes the problematic Israeli “reading” of Iran.

Prior to the 1979 revolution, Iran and Israel forged a close and very beneficial relationship, stemming from Israel’s strategy of “the Alliance of Periphery.” This alliance was aimed at bringing the three non-Arab countries of the Middle East — Israel, Turkey, and Iran, — and the Christian state of east Africa— Ethiopia—into a strategic collaboration vis-à-vis the Arab states. What brought these countries together was the fear of Nasser’s pan-Arabism, which appeared to be on the borders of each. Israel and Iran, apart from the strategic collaboration, also became trade partners. Iran supplied Israel most of its oil needs and Israeli companies worked throughout Iran in supplying military technology (ironically, even nuclear), agricultural assistance, and construction. The relationship thrived as both countries imagined themselves as non-Middle Eastern by nature. Israel’s self perception envisaged a Judeo-Christian civilization, and in Iran the Shah tried to instill the “Aryan Hypothesis” arguing that Iranians are of ancient indo-European tribes descent.

The 1979 revolution, however, took Iran to a different place in the Israeli imagination. Not only did Iran cease to be “modern,” but it also represented everything that seemed wrong and backward in the Middle East. The Israeli nightmare became a reality in the former close ally. Ram juxtaposes this development with the changing political reality in Israel, as the long time Ashkenazi ruling hegemony was voted out, and the ‘Likud’ party—overwhelmingly supported by religious Mizrahi Jews—came to power. At that point, Israelis saw Iran as a reflection of Israel’s own dark future if the Mizrahi forces in Israel should gain more political power. This sentiment grew stronger during the 1980s and the early 1990s. Ram brings a telling example of Iran’s function in the Israeli inner discourse in a slogan penned by Zionist leftist Meretz party in its 1992 campaign: “This is not Iran” (Kan lo iran). Ram explains: “in this slogan Meretz obviously rejected Iran, but at the same time it also suggested that Israel was becoming an Iran-like state, treading a dangerous path that might culminate in the establishment of a Jewish theocracy.”

In another important contribution of this work, Ram traces the place Iran had in the Israeli scholarship of the Middle East, especially on the Iranian Jews. Ram eloquently shows that the history of Iranian Jewry was written mainly by Iranian or Israeli Jews, and was deeply embedded in the Zionist paradigm, which denigrated Jewish existence anywhere but in Israel, and especially in a Muslim country. Therefore, the history of integrated communities in the Middle East was reduced to a history of persecution and cultural achievement.

Iranophobia is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in Israeli society. It helps explain Israeli anxieties about the Iranian nuclear threat and incidentally also helps explain Israeli anxieties in response to the Arab spring.

The Death of Qaddafi by Historians

The death of Muammar al-Qaddafi and the end of his rule in Libya marks the end of an era. Our untiring colleague in International History, Jeremi Suri, blogs about the historical background. More historical perspective, in particular about the backseat role the US played in these events, can be found at NPR’s website. And on the photoblog of The Atlantic is a collection of photographs from the last battles.

Syria´s President Hafez al-Asad (sitting on the right side) signing the Federation of Arab Republics in Benghazi, Libya, on April 18, 1971 with President Anwar al-Sadat (stting left) of Egypt and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya (sitting in the centre). The agreement never materialized into a federal union between the three Arab states.
Photo Credit: The Online Museum of Syrian History via Wikimedia Commons

For more on and by Jeremi Suri, see his website, which begins with another version of this article.

You may also like:
Chris Dietrich on Oil and Weapons in Libya
Lior Sternfeld on Asef Bayat’s book about Democratic Islam

Posted Saturday, October 22, 2011

Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village by Ronald P. Dore (1994)

by David A. Conrad

Ronald P. Dore’s Shinohata brings to life the recent history of rural Japan. Shinohata is a small, wooded village in Tochigi prefecture, part of Japan’s central plain. Dore, an English sociologist who first came to Japan during the American occupation after World War II, wrote the book after more than two decades of intermittent visits and observations in the town. Shinohata is a unique blend of scholarship and anecdote, insight and humor. The book goes beyond simple facts and impersonal statistics, and offers a memorable narrative of small town life in postwar Japan.

The first three chapters describe the town’s prewar history. Nineteenth-century famines, Meiji-era tax reforms, and twentieth century market fluctuations all affected the residents of Shinohata. Naturally, the war with America and the occupation that followed left their marks as well. But the basic social structures of the traditional village survived the upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relatively intact. In Shinohata in 1955, Dore says, “[n]obody subjectively felt that the world had fundamentally changed.”

By 1978, though, change was everywhere. Over the preceding twenty-three years, Dore and his friends in Shinohata had witnessed major shifts in the material aspects of village life. Items that once were luxuries, such as bicycles for children, now abounded. Virtually everyone had remodeled their homes to install tiled floors, tatami mats, modern bathtubs, color televisions, and so-called “Western” toilets that, as anyone who has been to Japan will confirm, are far superior to actual toilets in the West. Farming, the traditional mode of employment in Shinohata, had become mechanized, and almost nobody relied on it anymore for income. Household finances in Shinohata compared favorably with urban household revenues, and people in the town enjoyed more leisure time than they had in the past. Japan’s postwar economic boom proved more influential than all the crises and violence of the prewar decades.

Throughout the book, Dore provides a respectful and intimate look at the lives of Shinohata’s residents. A chapter called “Couples,” for example, deals with marriage and relationships, while “Growing-up” examines the habits of children and young adults. The townspeople Dore writes about are colorful and friendly, and he intersperses his clear prose with a chorus of local voices. He shares personal anecdotes and long passages of villagers’ conversations, and is careful to replace real names with pseudonyms to safeguard the privacy of people who were his neighbors and friends. The charm and poignancy of this rustic Japanese town will linger with readers, as will Dore’s important observations about the nature of twentieth-century rural Japan.

You may also enjoy David Conrad’s review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (1999)

Before John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, many English-language accounts of the United States’ occupation of Japan contextualized the event in terms of American foreign policy and the emerging Cold War. Scholars writing from this Western-centric perspective produced much fine scholarship, and no doubt will continue to do so. But Embracing Defeat shifted the discussion from a debate over American motives to an analysis of the Japanese experience, and in doing so won critical acclaim and popular success. This Pulitzer Prize-winning tome reveals to Western audiences what many in Japan have long understood: that the American occupation was, in many ways, the most transformative event in modern Japanese history.

Dower sets out to convey “some sense of the Japanese experience of defeat by focusing on social and cultural developments. . . at all levels of society.” Initially, the bitter reality that their exhausting war had ended in defeat proved profoundly demoralizing for many Japanese citizens. Dower’s portrayal of the shantytowns of bombed-out Tokyo provides poignant evidence of the impoverished condition in which many Japanese found themselves at war’s end. But as Japan embarked on its long occupation interlude, its citizens seized opportunities to start over, rebuild, and redefine their nation. Defeat became a creative process rather than a destructive one and the people of Japan embraced it with eagerness. In the atmosphere of reform that characterized the occupation, an efflorescence of what Dower calls “cultures of defeat” emerged. For example, kasutori culture explored the sleazy underside of urban life. Radical political movements tested the limits—and sincerity—of American reformism. Changes in artistic images, popular entertainment, songs, jokes, and even the Japanese language itself reflect the vitality and diversity of Japanese culture during the American occupation.

An aerial view of a destroyed residential area of Tokyo after the fire raids.

Dower’s Japan-centered perspective informs his judgment of the occupiers, whom he views as agents of imperialism as well as facilitators of positive change. If the occupation was a prologue to a new period of Japanese history, it was also the epilogue to an era of Western exploitation that began when Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to “open” to Western trade in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dower calls the occupation “the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’” The occupiers, under the leadership of the notoriously vain Douglas MacArthur, lived in enclaves of lavish comfort and issued imperious edicts. Nevertheless, Dower concedes that American reforms were “impressively liberal,” and he is critical of those in Japan and Washington who resisted reform. This group includes Japanese conservative politicians as well as the “old Japan hands” in the U.S. Department of State. To Dower, these were old-fashioned elitists who sought to restrict the influence of average citizens in the new Japan. Dower’s interpretation of the American occupation as a neocolonial as well as a progressive exercise rings true, but it is a delicate balancing act.

Embracing Defeat has received high praise in the academic and popular presses, and justly so. Nevertheless, the book has certain limitations. Dower concentrates almost exclusively on the experiences of urban-dwelling Japanese. The half of the population that lived in rural areas suffered more than their share of hardship during the war, and their story of change and recovery during the occupation is as fascinating as it is neglected. Still, Dower’s exploration of urban cultures in the occupation period is a monumental task, and he executes it marvelously. Embracing Defeat‘s engrossing account of social change during the American occupation of Japan has earned it a permanent place in the literature of that epochal event.

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Loseph Lelyveld (2010)

by Sundar Vadlamudi

Gandhi challenges biographers. The author must confront Gandhi’s prodigious writings, six decades of work as a political activist and social reformer, and importantly, his consecration as “Father of India” and international stature as Mahatma (Great Soul). Perhaps aware of this difficulty, Joseph Lelyveld sets himself a modest goal to “amplify rather than replace the standard narrative” of Gandhi’s life. The author, a former correspondent and Executive Editor of the New York Times, reported for nearly four decades on both India and South Africa. Thus, he brings a unique perspective to the project. In the book’s first part, Lelyveld revisits the oft-repeated tale of Gandhi’s transformation in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 from an unknown lawyer to a social reformer and a political organizer. The second part presents the well-known story of Gandhi’s trials and tribulations in his attempts to impose his ideas, developed during his South African experience, on a “recalcitrant India.” Throughout, Lelyveld focuses on Gandhi’s social reform efforts rather than his involvement in India’s nationalist movement for independence from British rule. His choice could have been influenced by the recent decline in public enthusiasm in India for Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence. Today, the term “Gandhian,” as Lelyveld notes, implies little more than “social conscience.”

Despite its conventional conclusions, Lelyveld’s biography acquired notoriety following a review in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the author depicts Gandhi as a bisexual and a racist during his stay in South Africa, a bald misrepresentation of the book. Lelyveld compares Gandhi’s pronouncements on black South Africans on different occasions and concludes that they remained “contradictory and unsettled.” The second instance of controversy relates to Gandhi’s relationship with an East Prussian Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. The two lived together for about three years in Transvaal and, in one letter, Gandhi pledges “more love, and yet more love… such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” But Lelyveld never implies that Gandhi and Kallenbach had a homosexual relationship. Rather, he indicates that Gandhi only expected love, devotion, and unquestioning support from Kallenbach. The unfortunate controversy overshadows some crucial points raised in the book.

Significantly, at several points, Lelyveld questions the historical construction of the myth about Gandhi. He points to the current South African government’s appropriation of Gandhi into its national history and he presents evidence that Gandhi actually supported South African whites’ suppression of the Zulus in the 1906 Bhambatha Rebellion. Similarly, he questions Gandhi’s saintly status as a champion of India’s lower-caste untouchables. Lelyveld illustrates Gandhi’s limited enthusiasm for a struggle by untouchables in Kerala (South India) to gain entry into temples since he believed that such conflicts could weaken the unity among Hindus in the larger struggle for Indian independence.

In his discussion of Gandhi’s successes and failures in India, Lelyveld treads on well- traveled ground and breaks no new turf. But, his discussion of Gandhi’s attitudes towards blacks and the absence of any sustained relationship between Gandhi and black South African leaders raises interesting questions about the role of race in the three-way contest between white settlers, black South Africans, and Indians. The book, therefore, promises to initiate further debate on Gandhi’s views on race as well as on racial relations among non-white populations in the British empire.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1980)

by Gail Minault

We are in the delivery room in Bombay, at midnight on August 14/15, 1947, the moment India and Pakistan are created as independent nations. Two children enter the world simultaneously, one Muslim, one Hindu, and their destinies will be determined by the timing of their birth. Through their eyes, and especially through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, the reader travels around the subcontinent, meeting the other children of partition and viewing every major national event until Saleem Sinai quite literally disintegrates. Saleem is the reader’s guide through the world of independent India and Pakistan; its problems become his problems in fantastic and unpredictable ways. Through this journey, Saleem must face his past and his future, and it is not always clear how they will come together.

Midnight’s Children, winner of the 1981 Man Booker Prize, stands out as the most compelling account of the surreal aspects of partition experienced by families throughout the affected areas. While it may seem unusual to turn to a work of magic realism for guidance on a topic as complex as partition, Rushdie captures the tensions of these historical events better than most standard histories. There are no Viceroys or national fathers in Rushdie’s novel. But there are fathers and mothers, lovers, sons and daughters, friends and bitter enemies. As a young Muslim entering newly created Pakistan, Saleem loses his memory, loses his connection to his past, his connection to the history of Muslims in India; now relegated to a separate chapter, a separate country, a separate history.

The realities of partition, it seems, are best interpreted through Rushdie’s magical landscapes. Writing in English, he nonetheless expands a body of Urdu and Hindi literature that, in the months and years after the traumatic migrations of 1947, tried to capture the sense of unease that the divide introduced. These stories and poems looked into the dark heart of partition, long before the high politics had concluded or become fodder for official histories. As in Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous Urdu short story of partition, Toba Tek Singh, where the actions of the sane appear insane, and the insane sane, Rushdie builds upon a tradition of interpretation that goes beyond the histories of real actors and dives into partition’s fictions, its profound surreality.

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan by Krishna Kumar (2001)

by Amber Abbas

Krishna Kumar’s study of school textbooks in Pakistan and India shows that the discipline of history in South Asia has “come under the strain of nation-building rather more than other subjects.” History teaching in these textbooks seeks to settle political and ideological points and guide children’s responses to present day situations.

The two states that were formed in 1947, India and Pakistan, share a history that national textbooks try to claim exclusively for each individual state. The freedom movement remains a controversial and tricky subject, a mere 60 years after independence. As a result of this nationalized education, informed knowledge of the other, neighboring nation, is rare in both places; powerful stereotypes have tended to stifle academic curiosity and serious enquiry. A particularly alarming discovery of Kumar’s study is the extent to which Indian and Pakistani school textbooks teach history by reading back outcomes onto causes. This tactic obscures any complexity in history, hiding the places where ideology and action fail to align, or where leaders changed their minds, altered their tactics, or went back on their word. It precludes any appreciation of the motivation of the historical actors at the time. This is history in reverse.

In both countries, textbooks deploy the freedom movement as a story about national values. The Pakistani narrative is dominated by a triumphal sense of self-protection and escape determined to serve as a unifying national ethos by emphasizing issues of the contemporary significance in the history of state-building. In India, by contrast, this narrative emphasizes the tolerance of different groups for one another in the course of an idealized and varied history. Great personalities of the freedom movement and of earlier periods are treated, not as complex and flawed historical figures, but as vessels for ideals for young readers to follow.

Kumar’s study, pensive and often self-reflective, reveals the importance of history as a practical discipline in schools. He laments the condition of education in both countries, and uses the freedom movement to investigate the political stifling of intellectual curiosity. In neither place is history considered a valuable subject for inquiry, or for students to acquire more practical skills. On the contrary, government and nationalist historians use the school textbook to train patriotic citizens willing and able to perpetuate the prejudices that led to the separation of the two states in the first place.

As textbook revision debates continue here in Texas with politically-motivated concerns about the teaching of Islam and other subjects, it is worth remembering that history is not a neutral field, rather it is often an ideological battle ground for conflicting narratives.

Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

In the wake of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, many try to predict whether Islam can exist together harmoniously with democracy. In this book, Bayat successfully dismantles the presumptions that constitute this discourse, by stating in the beginning that “the question is not whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy, or by extension, modernity, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make them compatible.” In order to answer this question Making Islam Democratic closely examines the different trajectories of two countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds: Iran and Egypt. Specifically Bayat asks why Iran produced an Islamic revolution, while Egypt developed only an Islamic Movement.

Bayat first analyzes Iran as a “revolution without movement,” arguing that as a result of years of a repressive political system the clergy failed to build social infrastructures and thought that the way to gain political influence would be to “recruit” the intellectual elites to their side. While they were successful in creating national-religious discourse among the intellectual elites, they “lost” the masses to other ideologies, such as Socialism, Marxism, and Secularism. The public heavily consumed western cultural products, magazines, movies, and books. During the revolution in 1979, the different sectors “were pushed into the arms of Shi’a clergy” to lead the revolution, but sectarianism remained present and vital.In Egypt, on the other hand, the Islamic parties could not participate in the political game, but succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the population by establishing a wide system of education, healthcare, banking and social welfare that benefitted the poor and traditional population of Egypt. The decision of the Egyptian ‘ulema (Muslim jurists) not to attempt to take over the government but rather to win the population allowed them work and prosper with government consent, and was therefore able to influence and Islamize society, which became significant later (as recently seen). This model can be useful to some extent in looking at other instances such as Turkey and Jordan.

Bayat has succeeded in writing a clear and jargon-free book. He supports his argument on profound research in these two telling case studies. This book eloquently refutes many common beliefs and anxieties about Islam and democracy.

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan (2008)

by Gail Minault

Reading this compelling account of the partition of India in 1947, one is moved to ask: What were they thinking? Early accounts of the end of British rule in India concentrate on the high politics of the negotiations between the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and a succession of Viceroys—ending with the striking and decisive Lord Mountbatten. The British were concerned to leave a legacy, of which they could be proud and hence avoid an unseemly civil war in the wake of their departure. Both the Congress, led by the future Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, were concerned to inherit a state or states that would be governable and would guarantee civil rights and economic improvement to their people. The negotiations had reached a stalemate by late 1946. Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in early 1947, rapidly decided that partition was the only solution, convinced the leaders to agree to the plan by early June, and then announced, to everyone’s amazement, that the transfer of power would take place in mid-August.

This grand narrative, with Mountbatten as the master of ceremonies, has remained dominant for far too long. Questions about Mountbatten’s judgment have emerged in recent years, but the politics of the partition settlement have generally remained at the center of historical focus. In this book, Yasmin Khan endeavors to change that focus by bringing together a range of voices that reveal the human toll of those hasty political decisions. The Great Partition, in other words, listens to “the Indian street,” the stories of ordinary men and women, hapless and displaced by decisions over which they had no control. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled for their lives to opposite sides of a frontier that was not defined until after Independence Day and its attendant celebrations. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the violence. The solidarity of neighborhoods and villages disintegrated.

Khan assembles an impressive array of sources from all levels of the social and political spectrum to paint a convincing picture of official incompetence and unseemly haste. The British were more concerned about withdrawal than with maintaining order as they did so. The political leadership, who should have been better prepared for the possibility of violent mass migration, remained remarkably insouciant, convinced that once power was transferred, all would be well. No such luck.

This dramatic account brings in much needed ground-level detail and opens up partition’s stories to more varied interpretations. It is accessibly written and I recommend it as a much-needed revision of the official partition histories of decades past.

Related recommendations:

Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (1989)

Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An Eye-Witness Account of the Partition of India (1998)

Gyanendra Pandey Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (2001)

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